


Dreamland I

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Series: Liminal Spaces [3]
Category: Sagas of Sundry: Dread (Web Series), Sagas of Sundry: Madness (Web Series)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Gen, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 18:51:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14721665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: When your role in life is to terrify the world, it's only to be expected that every once in a while, the world's going to turn around and terrify you right back.





	Dreamland I

The Storyteller drowses fitfully. He’s been hoping for the pain in his arm to return, for the wrenching agony as the book’s cover flies open and the pages begin to turn, but the only pain he’s had is from sleeping on Abigail’s sagging mattress. There is a spring on the verge of breaking through in one spot and, now that it’s in place, he can’t imagine it away.

Selina patters back and forth between her and Emmett’s rooms, so those are both out of the question, as is Fenly’s room. Jude’s room might have been nicer, but it stinks of cigarette smoke; even the blood on the mountain didn’t pervade everything around it quite that way. So Abigail’s bed it is, with its poking spring and black draperies.

Considering that there is a part of him that mourns the lives taken by the narrative, it seems appropriate.

He puts a cushion over the wayward spring and rolls onto his side, trying to block out the sound of Selina talking to herself upstairs. As the building’s singular tenant, her voice seems to be heard around every corner, down every corridor. Mostly she’s repeating her affirmations, and that’s good. Sometimes she breaks down and starts shrieking for the others, and the Storyteller would try to comfort her if not for the fact that the narrative would make him the landlord, or a cultist, or a corrupt police officer, and she’s not so far gone that she wouldn’t lash out.

He doesn’t know how many days-weeks-months it has been, but the machine is still on, and Selina has not yet broken.

Closing his eyes, he feels a deeper sleep taking over him, and falls into it with relief.

* * *

He wakes up and he’s still in the building, which is always the disappointing result. Beige wallpaper hangs loose around a gaping hole in the wall before him, and he realizes he’s in Emmett’s bathroom. Somnambulism’s a bitch.

“You killed me,” Sam says from the bathtub, shower curtain rings rattling along the railing as she steps out toward him.

“You’ll never escape,” the Watcher’s avatar says from through the wall, laughter rasping dryly out of glaring purple light.

The Storyteller takes a step backward and nearly trips over Emmett, who looks up, red-eyed, from the toilet. The stink of bile rises from the bowl.

“You try to claim you have no control over the narrative, wordslinger.” Emmett’s voice is hoarse. “Is that really true? How much of this is guided by you, and how much by chance?” He begins to cough and spits into the toilet bowl with a rattling sound. The Storyteller doesn’t want to look, but does so anyway.

The toilet is full of bile, blood, and typewriter keys.

“I—”

Words fail him. (Him! Of all people!) The Storyteller bolts from the room and down the stairs.

Abigail’s room is no safe haven. He can hear her in there, and Jude, and he is suddenly very afraid of what they might say to him. Or do to him. The building seems to be coming alive once more with its returned tenants, and it’s a proven fact that that isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Fenly’s room will be safe. He can check the fuse, maybe take some time with Fenly’s art supplies, since Selina will surely go to Emmett once she realizes the three of them have found their way back. He still doesn’t know how, but there were other rifts, and gods all know stepping from world to world becomes easier the more one does it.

The book on his forearm itches, but he thinks it’s wishful thinking.

There is a light on in Fenly’s room, which is normal, and a smell of fresh paint, which is not.

The Storyteller steps into the humble room and stops.

Fenly’s there. Falling back out of the void is not supposed to be possible, but Fenly’s there, a brush laden with orange paint in his hand, a canvas propped on his knees as he sits facing the bed, his back to the door. And he’s _laughing_ , not the self-deprecatory giggle that came out through most of his soiree, but a real laugh.

There’s someone sitting on the bed, leaning back against the head of it. The orange on Fenly’s brush matches the orange on the plaid shirt, and with a touch more brown would match the ginger of the young man’s hair.

“Well, look who’s here,” says Tanner, rolling off the bed to his feet.

Fenly puts down his brush and canvas on his desk and rises as well; the two of them stand side by side and the Storyteller realizes that maybe Fenly’s room isn’t safe after all.

“What are you doing here, narrator?” Tanner asks.

“Why couldn’t you let us rest?” Fenly adds, and the Storyteller sees a light in his eyes that makes him wonder why he kept describing Fenly as sweet and innocent. Those qualities still exist in him, yes, but they have been tempered by those events that scarred his arms, and the Storyteller wishes he’d seen it sooner.

“I didn’t wake you up,” he says, tongue feeling numb in his mouth.

“Who else would have the power?” Tanner steps closer. “Who but a story’s teller has the power to resurrect the dead?”

“To bring someone back from the void?” Fenly touches the Storyteller’s cheek, and his fingers are bruisingly cold. “Were you lonely here, like Selina?”

“Lonely like Sat in the hospital?” Tanner comes closer still, and the Storyteller finds himself riveted to the spot, unable to take so much as one step of his own.

“Lonely like my friends looking for the ruby slippers to bring them home?”

“Lonely like Darby, just wanting someone, _anyone_ to believe her?”

“Enough,” the Storyteller whispers. “Enough, I can’t, I only say the words I’m given, once the narrative starts flowing I can’t direct the river, it’s not me, it’s _not my fault_!” The words are garbled because of the way the cold radiates from Fenly’s fingers through his face, but they are evidently clear _enough_.

“All right,” Fenly says. His void-cold hand drops from the Storyteller’s cheek to his shoulder and the Storyteller flinches as skin tears in the process. “That’s enough emotional pain.”

The Storyteller knows better than to ignore the specification. “What other pain is there?” he asks despite his misgivings, wishing he’d gone and sat in Jude’s room, reeking though it does of cigarettes and the desperate anger of business dealings.

“You describe biting a lot,” Tanner says simply.

The Storyteller closes his eyes as they fall upon him, but he still sees Tanner’s jagged teeth and Fenly’s hooked fangs.

* * *

He wakes up,  _really_ wakes up, back in Abigail’s bed, seemingly untouched. There’s a heavy weight on his chest and he almost screams before realizing it’s her cat. The cat stretches, looks at him curiously, and then jumps to the floor, padding nonchalantly out of the room. He rolls to get up and the busted spring jabs him in the side. Definitely reality, or at least the please he's been calling reality for the last little while.

The Storyteller goes into the bathroom, as bad an idea as that usually is in this building, and washes his face. Looking at his throat, there aren’t chunks missing; he rolls up his sleeves and sees the book infuriatingly closed, but still _there_ and not chewed out of his arm.

It’s only when he peers right up close into the mirror that he sees the fingerprints on his cheek.

The dream left him a souvenir after all.


End file.
